


Chess

by thesometimeswarrior



Series: Hold the Fort: Pictures of Hogwarts During the Year of the Carrows [10]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Dubious Ethics, Ethics, Gen, Guilt, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Post-Battle of Hogwarts, Sacrifice, Self-Sacrifice, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-28
Updated: 2016-04-28
Packaged: 2018-06-05 00:48:37
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,553
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6682756
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thesometimeswarrior/pseuds/thesometimeswarrior
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"'Ms. Granger explained to me why you went to V-Voldemort in the forest. That Professor Dumbledore knew from the beginning that, in the end, you’d have to…well…'</p><p>'That I’d have to die.'</p><p>Minerva almost cringes at how nonchalantly he is able to express the notion.  But then, she supposes, expressing it must be nothing compared to actually living it. </p><p>'I didn’t know, Mr. Potter. I never knew. If I had…well…I don’t know what I would have done. But please do not mistake me; that does not make my inaction excusable.'"</p><p> </p><p>Minerva is outraged to discover a certain truth to Albus Dumbledore's wartime strategy. Outraged, and devestated, and at a loss.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Chess

She finds out two days after the Battle. When she does, the only thing that keeps her from breaking into Albus’s grave—because _how could he?_ — is the threat of creating more debris, and only then because more of a mess would be unfair to those who were working tirelessly to repair Hogwarts. 

Instead, she downs several glasses of Firewhiskey.

The next morning, she doesn’t arrive to the Great Hall with her usual promptness to help allocate clean-up tasks. She has a raging headache—no doubt from the Firewhiskey—and she feels an emptiness in her chest, in her very bones, and she does not know which is the reason why she cannot bring herself to get out of bed. She does not look at her clock, but she estimates that it is mid-morning when there is a knock at her door.

“Yes?” she calls faintly.

“Professor?” Neville Longbottom cracks open the door. “I brought you some breakfast.”

“Oh, thank you, Mr. Longbottom.” She sits up in bed. “Please come in.”

He complies, setting a tray down on her table as he does so. He seems unfazed by the sight of her, still in her dressing gown, still in bed. But he creases his eyebrows, as if in concern. “Are you alright, Professor?”

She sighs. She is proud of this boy—young man now, more than a boy—who has been more her ally than her student over the past year, who has worked tirelessly along with her, and often more successfully than she, to protect and defend the students of Hogwarts. She is proud of all he has done, proud of how confidently he now inhabits the skin that hung on him so awkwardly for so long. 

But in this light, his fresh scars and even fresher burns stand out on his fair skin. He had been her charge—they all had—and she had had a duty to protect him. 

Just as Albus had had a duty. To _protect._

“Yes,” she says finally. “Yes, Mr. Longbottom, I’ll be alright.”

He doesn’t push; it isn’t his way, as Minerva has learned well. But he sits down, ready, she knows, to hear more if she wants to share. The thought comes to her unbidden that he would be a phenomenal teacher…she will have to keep this in mind, now that she is to be headmistress…

But, for now, he has brought her breakfast. “Thank you,” she says. “I am sorry that I didn’t make it to the Great Hall this morning. Hopefully it wasn’t too chaotic.”

“Nah,” responds Neville. “I had a couple people go to the Kitchens to help out the House Elves—Kreacher said that it’s a bit of a mess down there, and I figured their clean-up would go quicker if they had some wands helping them. Otherwise, same parties as yesterday, heading to various parts of the Grounds, and I organized a group to head up to the Towers to Wingardium Leviosa what they can back into place—just so nothing else falls, ya know?”

Despite herself, she smiles at how naturally this Neville wears leadership, and wonders what the eleven-year-old Neville would think if he met his seventeen-year-old-self. It’s a momentary respite, and then her fury at Albus—and the ache that it brings with it—returns. 

“Was Mr. Potter present this morning?” she asks,

“Yeah.” Neville rolls his eyes. “I told him to go back to bed, after everything he could use a break, but he wouldn’t listen. Said he has no right sleeping while everyone else is rebuilding. Mind you, no one else _died_ and came back to life…But you know Harry.”

“Yes,” she sighs. “I certainly do. Would you do me a favor, Mr. Longbottom, and ask if he would come here? I have something I wish to discuss with him.”

“Sure thing, Professor,” says Neville, standing. “Is there anything else you need?”

“No, but thank you very much, Mr. Longbottom. As soon as I’ve had the conversation with Mr. Potter, I will come and contribute to the clean up efforts.”

“You know, you and Harry are a lot alike. You could use some rest too, after the year you’ve had. You should take the day…”

“But I won’t. I could say the same to you, Mr. Longbottom. And I know you won’t either. Perhaps it is a Gryffindor trait.”

“No,” says Neville firmly. “Have you seen Hannah? She’s a Hufflepuff and the most dedicated of all of us.”

“Perhaps it is a Hogwarts trait, then. The need to defend, to work for the good of everyone in the school.”

As she says it, she thinks of Albus. That look he gave her when she had tried to jump to his defense when Fudge tried to arrest him. _He will not be single-handed!_ she had shouted then, and his response: _Oh yes he will, Minerva! Hogwarts needs you!_ She had interpreted that as…what? Concern for her? Self-sacrifice? But there was a part of her who knew that it had also been part of his larger chess game. Sacrifice himself, allow her to stay at Hogwarts, protect the students, the school. The greatest good for the greatest number. The Utilitarianism that she had never quite mastered. Chess, at which he was always slightly better than she.

But self-sacrifice was one thing; sacrificing another—a student, a _child_ —that was quite another. How _could_ he?

“Well, do _try_ to take it easy, Professor, okay?” Neville says, snapping Minerva out of her thoughts. He nods to her before leaving the room. 

Minerva rises, meaning to dress herself before Potter comes, thinking that she wants to appear as respectable and serious as she can for this conversation. She tries to nibble on some of the toast from the tray that Neville has brought her, but finds that she has no appetite. Instead, she manages to consume only a cup of tea.

After a fashion, there is another knock at the door, and her stomach lurches. “Come in.”

Harry Potter stands in her threshold, his eyes weary and the bags under them dark. Like Neville’s, his scars, too, are evident, though his appear to be more of the internal rather than external variety. Minerva can scarcely believe that he is only seventeen-years-old. 

“Neville said you wanted to see me?”

“Yes,” she says, trying to sound professional. “Please have a seat, Mr. Potter.”

When he complies, she pours him a cup of tea before asking, as tenderly as she has ever spoken to him, “How are you?”

He doesn’t speak right away, only looks at her, trying, it seems, to gage what she wants to hear. He has, she realizes suddenly, had to be a symbol in addition to a solider, for so many for so long. He looks so weary, she thinks. So sad. And the symbol of the Light, of Victory over Evil, cannot admit that such a victory has come at a price, was a struggle, was not inevitable. And yet…

She reaches across her desk and place’s her hand on her former student’s, hoping to transmit a sense of understanding. She is interested in _his_ well-being, not that of the symbol.

“I...,” Harry Potter begins, before allowing his defenses to drop. “I’m tired.” 

“As you have a right to be,” she says. “Mr. Longbottom says that he has encouraged you to take some time to rest—I must say I agree with him, Potter.”

“Everyone’s tired,” he says. “Merlin knows Neville has had a lot to deal with, and he’s not resting, is he? He’s out directing the rebuilding efforts!”

“Yes, and I do wish that he would also rest. But you have had something of a unique burden.”

“Nonetheless Professor, I’m not the only one who’s suffered under Voldemort.” Harry responds coldly.

“I’m well aware of that, Potter,” she sighs. “In any case, as concerned as I am for your well-being, and I _am_ Potter.” She feels a need, in light of the new information, to make this expressly clear. “I no longer posses the authority to tell you what to do. Perhaps I never really did. And this is not why I wanted to speak to you.”

Potter is less aware than Neville of the nuance in how she speaks, that she’s at once upset and nervous about the conversation that they’re about to have. Potter does not furrow his brows at her in concern—either out of ignorance or the fact that he’s too weary—but just continues to gaze at her, expectantly.

“I need to apologize to you, Mr. Potter. Harry.”

Whatever Harry had expected, evidently it wasn’t this. His eyebrows fly to his forehead in a way that reminds Minerva at once of Lily. “Sorry?”

Minerva takes a deep breath before answering. “Ms. Granger explained to me why you went to V-Voldemort in the forest. That Professor Dumbledore knew from the beginning that, in the end, you’d have to…well…”

“That I’d have to die.”

Minerva almost cringes at how nonchalantly he is able to express the notion. But then, she supposes, expressing it must be nothing compared to actually living it. 

“I didn’t know, Mr. Potter. I never knew. If I had…well…I don’t know what I would have done. But please do not mistake me; that does not make my inaction excusable. I—”

“I don’t regret it, Professor.” He pauses. “If it could save the people I loved, I never _could_ regret it. And besides, in a way, those seventeen years were all borrowed time anyway.” 

This is Albus speaking, Minerva thinks. She wonders how much of what the boy says is Albus speaking, Albus who has been pulling the strings of Harry Potter’s life since he was a year old. 

“Nonetheless, it should have been your decision to make—” 

“It _was_ —”

“—And you were our student, our _charge_. It was our responsibility as Hogwarts faculty to protect you.” As she struggles to stay in control of herself, Minerva suddenly finds herself thinking not only of Harry’s ultimate sacrifice of three days before, but of the whole preceding year. He—and Granger, and Weasely—may have been of age, but they should still have been her students. She still should have kept them safe, and yet they had been tortured, nearly killed, on the run…it was _wrong_. “And protecting you does not mean….mean… _grooming_ you to be a willing sacrifice!”

“I spent a lot of the past year angry at Dumbledore too, Professor. But the only thing he ‘groomed’ me to do was understand the power of Love when I dismissed it as if it were nothing.” He paused. “And anyway, it wasn’t just him. Do you know what I’ve been thinking about since this all has been over?”

Minerva shook her head.

“Your chessboard.”

She creases her eyebrows in confusion.

“You remember my first year, Professor? All that nonsense with the Philosopher’s Stone?”

How could she forget? The year Quirin— _Quirrell_ had very nearly murdered one of their students. “Of course.”

“You remember your life-size chessboard that you set up as a defense, that Ron, Hermionie and I played across?”

“I certainly do.”

“Well, Ron was the one playing for us really. He was a knight. And we didn’t know what would happen when one of us was captured—didn’t know that we wouldn’t be killed. So Ron figured out that the way we would get checkmate was to sacrifice a knight—the knight he was playing as.” He pauses, to catch his breath, as though after everything, this still makes him more emotional than anything else that has happened in the long seven preceding years. “We tried to stop him—we begged him, actually. But he turned to me and said—and I’ll never forget the exact words he said, Professor—he said, ‘That’s chess! You’ve got to make some sacrifices!’ He was willing, if it meant stopping—well, we thought it was Snape—from getting the Stone. He was willing at eleven-years-old, to die for that, to protect the people he loved. Because we thought—well, we didn’t fully understand what it meant at the time—but we got that if Riddle got the Stone, he’d be back! And Ron was right; that _is_ chess. And it’s also War.”

There is a lump in Minerva’s throat, such that she cannot bring herself to speak. He sounds so much like Albus. This _is_ Albus speaking, it must be. But she cannot think of a counter argument. All she can do is think about how much she hates this war, and she has to remind herself that it is over. It’s done. They’re _safe._

After this silent moment, Harry stands. “So, thank you very much for the apology, Professor. But I don’t regret anything. And neither should you. Now, I’m going to help them clean up the Kitchens.”

* * *

It takes her well over a week to enter his old office. 

“I was wondering when you’d finally come,” he says genially when he sees her from his portrait. “It’s your office, after all!”

“I didn’t want to face you. I was— _am_ —infuriated with you.”

The portrait sighs. “Yes, Harry told me about your conversation with him…”

“ _How could you, Albus?!_ ” she explodes, unable to stop herself. “You had a _duty of care_!”

“Do you think I didn’t know that?” he said, suddenly serious. “Do you think I didn’t look in the mirror ever day and see Gellert and _weep_ for what I was doing for fourteen long years? I knew that it was despicable. That I was sacrificing whatever ounce of morality I had left in me along with Harry’s life. But what could I do, Minerva?”

“You could have let him decide!”

“I did, in the end…”

“Only after years of filling his head with thoughts about the power of sacrifice and love, and by quoting Muggle fantasy authors that ‘Death is just an adventure’ or other such nonsense! He sounds just _like_ you Albus! Do you think that’s really _him_ speaking?”

“I’m afraid we will never know. Harry’s choice was his own—”

“After you molded him into a perfect pawn for your chess game for seventeen _years_!”

“What can I tell you? I loathed myself. I wept with joy the day Voldemort returned to corporeal form, because I knew that, because Riddle had taken Harry’s blood, there was a slim chance Harry would survive. I was overwhelmed with the relief I felt. But I nonetheless had a duty to save as many lives as I could, Minerva.”

“He wasn’t a chess piece, Albus! This was his _life_!”

“And now the war is over. He can live it. All is well. We can put away the chessboard and its ethics and be _Good_.”

“I’m going to be a better Headmaster than you were.” It comes out of her mouth before she realizes she’s thinking it, but she finds to her surprise she doesn’t regret it when it does.

Also to Minerva’s surprise, the portrait smiles. “Of that, I have no doubt. Peace is precious, Minerva. Guard it well for me.”

She gives the portrait—and herself—a curt nod before sitting at the desk, ready to plan for the future of Hogwarts, where she knows young minds will grow, safe at last.

**Author's Note:**

> I just have so many feelings about Minerva and as a teacher, and how seriously she takes her duty of care, how much she cares for Harry. This is evident from her reaction when she thinks he's dead. So I wondered how'd she react to find out about Albus's plan.
> 
> Hope you enjoyed!


End file.
